A police procedural featuring a murderer who chooses his victims by their street address.
Almost everyone lives in a town with a Main Street. You said this wasn’t like any terrorism you had seen. That’s because we think of terrorism as something that happens in the cities. Nw York, Washington, DC, LA. This does something subtler but maybe more troubling. It hits close home. Somebody creeing into your house at night and killing you for no reason.
An FBI agent who doesn’t show up at those crime scenes like an arrogant asshole.
More times than he could count, Walker had witnessed the first agent on the scene get off on the wrong foot with the local guys. Sometimes deliberately, more often just out of carelessness. Normally, his working assumption was that any way he could defer to the locals was worthwhile. These officers were fresh, knew nothing about the other killings as yet. He wanted their initial impressions.
And a small-town cop with only three years on the job.
“It’s on the nightstand door. The marking you’re looking for.”
Walker took a step closer. That was exactly what he was looking for. In the midst of the blood spatters, the same mark he had seen on the bedroom carpet in Long Island.
“Was that marking at the other scenes?” Hill asked.
Walker nodded. “At least one of them.” He turned to Hill. “What does it look like to you?”
“It looks like a digital pin on a map.”
Because she noticed the clue (that her partner blew off) Agent Walker conscripts Officer Zoe Hill onto the FBI team leading a nationwide hunt for the killer of a local citizen in her hometown. It is the killer’s fourth murder on a list that drops pins on Main Streets all over the map of the US and escalates in violence from knives to guns to bombs and never mind the collateral damage.
There is a solid cast of characters here, including competent cops, a nerd who unlike most fictional nerds actually goes out in daylight, and a hard-nosed, ambitious boss who doesn’t, after all, hang Walker out to dry when the bad guy slips through their fingers. Bell’s neatest trick is to use the setting itself, Main Street, Our Town, a safe, homely place where nothing like this ever happens to strike terror into the hearts of as many ordinary citizens as possible, succeeding to the point that you’re grateful that no real terrorist thought of it first. A quick read and a good yarn.